1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to providing advertisements (ads) via a network, such as the Internet and, more particularly, to methods and systems for providing creation, serving and tracking of ads.
2. Description of Related Art
With the advent of the Internet, an industry has arisen focused on serving ads. Such industry includes marketers or advertisers, which typically undertake the marketing of their own products and services, ad agencies, which typically undertake planning, creating, executing and tracking ad campaigns on behalf of their clients, and web publishers, which typically operate one or more websites and sell ad space on such sites. The tracking of ads and ad campaigns generally involves monitoring the effectiveness of each ad, for example, by the number of times the ad is viewed by a users (often referred to as a “page view”), the number of times a user activates a link in the ad to the advertiser's web page (often referred to as a “click-through”), the number of times a user makes a purchase after activating a link in the ad (often referred to as an “acquisition”). To effectively track ads, the computer code that comprises the ad contains code that monitors the relevant metrics.
Numerous companies have been created to provide software tools to assist such entities involved in the advertising industry. These tools often purport to simplify and increase the efficiency of the planning, execution and analysis of ad campaigns. Despite such tools, ads and ad campaigns can be difficult to create, execute and analyze.
For example, the processes of providing, or “serving,” the ads and tracking the ads can be technically complicated, especially where one entity is serving a large number of ads. An ad is typically an item of computer code that is pulled from an ad server and incorporated into the desired Web page. In general, the entity serving the ads receives the advertising content from the advertisers or agencies and must incorporate the content into the ad code. Such a process is labor intensive and requires the ad-serving entity to maintain a staff of programmers. These programmers must be used not only to incorporate the received ad content into the ad code to be served, but also to effectuate changes to the ad content received from the advertiser or agency. Such work is labor intensive and results in both decreased profits for the entities serving the ads and, to the extent the cost is not completely absorbed by the entity serving the ad, increased advertising costs to the advertiser and/or agency.
To make matters worse, there are no meaningful economies of scale. Working with more ad agencies and serving more ads only requires a greater number of programmers to address these problems. In short, serving more ads exacerbates the problems.
The existing ad tools do not adequately address these problems. Accordingly, there exists a need for an improved system and method for creating, serving and tracking ads.